Give Me Everything You Have: On Being Stalked (14 page)

But of course that isn’t the end of the matter. Before she leaves, she unfastens her girdle, a cincture of green silk, and very touchingly asks her unyielding knight to accept it as a keepsake, a souvenir of their sweetly charged exchanges. Even this he attempts to refuse, but as he does so she plays her trump card, parrying him with the unexpected and, under the circumstances, extremely interesting information that this ghostly green shimmer, this near-virtual token of herself, happens to be endowed with magical properties, whereby no man who wears it may be cut down or killed. On learning this, our hero, who has spent a restless night dreaming of his imminent beheading, reveals at last a mortal flaw in his character: a willingness to cheat death. Sexual attraction alone may not have been powerful enough to win him to wrong, but that narrow form of desire is after all only a special instance of the desire for life itself (so the episode seems to be telling us), and this—the hope of warding off death, of arming himself with a talisman powerful enough to lift tomorrow’s heavy sentence from his shoulders—is irresistible. He accepts the gift—how could he not?—without further argument. As the lady presses it into his hand, she begs him not to mention it to her husband, and he agrees, enmeshed already in the swiftly escalating logic of deceit.

So resilient, however, is his image of himself as a paragon of virtue and honor that for a time he succeeds in inducing a state of complete denial concerning his own deed. Hiding the girdle in his room, he goes to the castle chapel to make confession in preparation for the next day’s ordeal, emerging as “clene”—so the glintingly deadpan narrator assures us—as a shriven soul on judgment day, even though he hasn’t said a word about his illicit possession of sorcerous materials or his intent to renege on the spirit, if not the letter, of his solemn covenant. And that evening, when he meets Sir Bertilak for the third exchange of spoils, he steps cheerfully forward to pass on his morning’s harvest of kisses (Judas kisses, they inevitably seem at this point) without a word, or even a thought, about the densely potent garment secreted in his chamber. He doesn’t, yet, seem to have any idea what he has done.

But then what
has
he done?

Part III

The Borderline

The question of “reputation,” to the extent that it had ever interested me before this episode, had done so for purely literary, or antiquarian, reasons. It belonged, I assumed, to a bygone world where communications were imperfect and social arrangements consequently more dependent on trust and hearsay than they are now. In the past your “name”—what other people could report about you—was crucial to your survival, whether you were a medieval knight or an Elizabethan merchant or a Victorian governess. A stain on your honor was potentially catastrophic, and so you guarded it jealously and defended it, if necessary, with your life.

In our own time, with more efficient information systems at our disposal, we were no longer, I supposed, so much at the mercy of other people’s perceptions or opinions. Facts could be checked; rumors and falsehoods refuted. A phone or a plane could bring you into direct contact with a potential business partner or employer. Reputation still meant something, but it no longer meant everything, and no longer required the implied threat of pistols at dawn to underwrite it, or suicide to purge its loss. The insane dueling culture of the past—fights to the death over obscure points of musical criticism, demotion to the ranks for failing to resent an insult—had become obsolete and was fast becoming incomprehensible. People could relax, finally, from the state of coiled-up vigilance in which those who wished to get on in the world had spent their lives for so many centuries.

And yet it seems that sometime near the end of the twentieth century, by a curious quirk of scientific progress, history, in this regard, reversed course. The Internet emerged, and with it the arbitration of reality began to pass back from the realm of verifiable fact to that of rumor and report, from the actual to the virtual. The latter, an indiscriminate tumult of truth and lies, was the zone in which our public identities, our outer selves, once again began to assume their definitive form. There was the private self, still, but for anyone who interacted with the world there was this strange new emanation of yourself, your Internet presence, and it was by this, increasingly, that others knew you and judged you.

Very quickly it was discovered that you could manipulate it: glamorize your image, finesse your biography. And by the same token, you could manipulate other people’s presences: boost an ally’s standing, or launch a corrosive lie against an enemy. One would think that the ease of performing such manipulations, and the large scale on which they immediately began occurring, would have long ago discredited the Web as a source of information about anything, but although we all acknowledge the need to be cautious, to discount much of what we read, split the difference between conflicting statements and so on, our first instinct, being creatures of the Word, is to trust it, and even on deeper consideration we tend to feel that it is basically more right than wrong, and that we can accept its approximations as the truth. You are what the Web says you are, and if it misrepresents you, the feeling of outrage, anguish, of having been violated in some elemental layer of your existence, is, as I began to learn, peculiarly crushing. Reputation (“the gentleman’s second soul,” as someone put it) is once again asserting its power to make or break us. At the present time of writing, a teenage girl has just hanged herself, a victim of cyber-attacks, and the papers are full of editorials about the deadly effectiveness of this form of bullying, how much more dangerous it is than the old-fashioned kind. I believe it. The essence of bullying is to convey the impression that the bully is the representative of a group, a majority, a consensus, while the victim is all alone. With the Internet the scale of alliances that the oppressor can suggest is limitless, and the feeling of isolation in the victim becomes correspondingly acute. And because, being human, one attributes a kind of human consciousness to this seething electronic data cloud, one also attributes to it a capacity for coherent judgment. The world has decided I am a loser, a monster, a jerk, a slut, whatever, goes the logic of the despairing outcast; how can I ever hope to counteract something so vast, and if I can’t, how can I ever show my face again? Spite has never had such an efficient instrument at its disposal.

The Amazon postings came down, but others went up. On a popular book site,
Goodreads.com
, I found another attack on my story “The Siege” (here retitled “Besieged” after a movie based on it). The review was posted by someone calling herself Elise but there was no doubt in my mind that it was Nasreen. Her imitation of the steely tones of scholarly disquiet begins alarmingly well: “The premise is racist and horribly frightening, considering the reality of surveillance issues in many developing nations…” Halfway through there’s a slight lapse in verbal poise: “There is a trend of uppidy perversion in Mr. Lasdun’s books, which is creepy though not interesting…” I hoped that “uppidy” might indicate something not quite trustworthy about the attack, but the last sentence resumes control with a masterfully understated little piece of nastiness that left me bathed in cold sweat:

“It’s worrisome that he teaches at colleges…”

Once again I seemed to be observing my reflection, my “second soul,” undergoing some transformation that I was helpless to prevent. Here I was, a standard-issue liberal with unimpeachably correct views on everything, casting the shadow of some leering, reactionary bigot. Unlike Amazon, Goodreads doesn’t have a “report” option for malicious postings, so there it still sits today, a little inexhaustible font of poison spreading its plumes into the hitherto clear waters of my virtual self.

Some years earlier I’d been given a short entry in Wikipedia. It was full of minor inaccuracies and misrepresentations (it called me an academic, for instance, which I am not). Trivial as these things were, and presumably not malicious, they bothered me much more than they would have done in an old-fashioned printed reference work. There, they would have simply been mistakes: amenable to correction. Here, they seemed to
usurp
the facts. Wikipedia says you are an academic? Very well, you are an academic. I had no idea how to go about altering the entry; as a matter of fact I didn’t know it
could
be altered until I got an email from Nasreen with a jeering hint in it about tampering with Wikipedia entries.

The foreboding I experienced as I logged on to Wikipedia.org and checked my entry can be easily imagined. (This cyber-narcissism, not a vice I’d been prone to before, was another gift from Nasreen: I became—it sounds like a malady from some Victorian hygiene pamphlet—a compulsive self-googler.) Was Wikipedia now going to declare me some kind of notorious Zionist literary racketeer? Interestingly, given that she had figured out how to vandalize the site, Nasreen’s attack seemed, on the face of it, oddly restrained. There were no accusations of plagiarism, no pseudo-scholarly exposés of misogyny or racism. Instead, there was a single, scatological phrase, inserted into a passage quoting the judges’ citation for an award I had won for a story. It was extremely silly, but it had a certain wit, jumping out from the otherwise staid language of a typical wiki entry, and I might have laughed if the entry hadn’t been about me. No doubt, like King Midas whispering to the reeds about his asses’ ears, I am doing myself no favors by repeating it, but my interest here is in presenting this case in all its rich awfulness, not in preserving my dignity. “We chose the story that lingered most,” the judges had written, to which Nasreen had appended: “like a fart.”

I didn’t think much of it at first, but when I checked again a few weeks later and saw that it was still there, lingering malodorously over my entry, I began to sense that it was a cleverer attack than I had realized. Outright denunciations would have aroused suspicion in a Wikipedia entry, which, unlike an Amazon review, is presumably supposed to be neutral. This, however, was like a piece of sly, barely noticeable graffiti that might make people chuckle but probably wouldn’t cause them to try to do anything about it, even if they knew how. But its real harm was the notice it gave that I was a person to whom such a thing could be done: that I had attracted an enemy who wanted the world to categorize me as an object of scorn. Whether randomly or out of deliberate selection, I had been successfully targeted, and with the most primevally effective form of malediction: my name mingled with the smell of shit. Cockroaches, vermin, excrement … there are certain phenomena that, purely by association, have an ability to reassign a person from the category of human being, in their fellow citizens’ minds, to that of waste. All one has to do to trigger the process is find an arresting way of raising the connection. From my self-googling I knew that this Wikipedia entry was usually the first link that came up under my name, which meant that it was the site most commonly visited by anyone looking me up. Again, I am conscious of the dangers of exaggeration here, of sounding self-important or even paranoid (though God knows I did become paranoid in time), and I should say that I realize, again, that probably only a handful of people have ever had any reason to look me up on Wikipedia. But there it was, nevertheless, and it was impossible for me not to imagine the wave of reflexively withdrawn interest, accompanied by the wrinkling of noses, as these people, however few they were, thought better of reading my books, or hiring me to teach, or inviting me to give a reading, or commissioning an article from me, and typed another author’s name into the search box instead—someone who didn’t trail this unwholesome aura of trouble. I did complain to Wikipedia, and in time received a sympathetic note back, but it was several months before the entry was changed, and by then I had begun to feel like a leper.

Along with these Web attacks, there was yet another development in the email campaign. From my imagined co-conspirators, Nasreen had now progressed to emailing organizations I was professionally associated with. My literary agency in London was sent an email accusing me of the familiar crimes. The Personals department of the
London Review of Books
, bizarrely, was sent an enraged email heaping curses on me (Nasreen obligingly copied me on this). As a freelance writer I depend for my living on easy relations with magazines, newspapers, creative-writing departments, reading venues, and so on. Nowadays any involvement you might have with such places leaves some kind of record on the Web. All Nasreen had to do was work her way through my Google pages and she could systematically denounce me to every one of them. Given her explicit intent to “ruin” me, I had to assume that this was what she was doing. Very rapidly my relations with all of them became tinged, on my side, with anxiety. Had she contacted them? If so, were they interested? Concerned? Indifferent? I could have asked them, of course, but the thought of doing so seemed, as I considered it, fraught with difficulties. If they hadn’t heard from her, what would they make of my strange tale of a former student denouncing me as a plagiarizing sexual predator? Somehow it seemed a mistake to introduce such a concept of myself into the minds of other people, even my friends. And if they
had
heard from her, well, what good would it do for me to ask them to please take no notice of what she said? Some of these organizations knew me well enough to dismiss out of hand any of Nasreen’s slanders, but some, I had to surmise, might be given pause, if only by that admirable human instinct for fair play. Putting myself in their position, I had no choice (as I imagined them reading her accusations) but to regard myself in a new and questionable light, and it seemed to me I could sense the first small but decisive motions of disengagement. I quickly succumbed to a kind of paralyzed dread: fearing the worst on every front, nervously examining my correspondence with these people for signs of distrust, attributing longer than usual silences to decisions to cut me off, but unable to bring myself to find out if the worst had actually occurred.